When Stephen Downes and George Siemens, a pair of Canadian academics, began building the world’s first massive open online course (or MOOC) back in 2008, they weren’t exactly expecting massive success.

They ended up with 2,200 virtual students— a
then-massive amount. Thankfully the course, which explored connectivist
learning theory, was able to accommodate the influx because it had been
thoughtfully built by the pair as a “distributed network of interconnected
resources.”

“Because we designed it in a decentralized
way, 2,200 people fit nicely,” Downes says. The course utilized a Moodle for formal
content, a Wiki for building out knowledge, and a tool called Grasshopper,
which Downes had personally built as an aggregator, content management system
and mailing list.

Today, of course, other technologies come into
play when building a successful MOOC, many of which Downes will be exploring
during his upcoming workshop at the eLearning Africa Conference in Côte d’Ivoire next month. A
prolific commentator on all things technology and education, Downes keeps tabs
on all the latest innovations in his newsletterOLDaily.
He’s most excited about how technologies like AI, blockchain, cloud technology
and artificial intelligence will revolutionize the ways we learn.

Take AI — not only could the technology
recommend content to learners based on their needs, he says, it could also
create resources as-needed on the fly, whether that means writing an article
for students to read or an instruction manual for them to follow.

Blockchain, too, offers a unique value to
educational institutions: because the cryptography is resistant to any form of
modification, it’s perfect for credentialing students. When Downes offered a
MOOC this year from the National Research Council, he awarded digital badges to
students based on their completion of each of his course’s nine units, and then
stored those badges on a secure blockchain. “The benefit is that it offers
greater credibility,” he says. “No one can come along and try to change it.”

This level of security could end up becoming
most crucial in developing nations, where the verification of one’s
qualifications is even more important, Downes says.

In fact, all of the technologies primed to
revolutionize education could be especially impactful in areas with fewer
resources. Whether by developing local cloud technologies (to save money on
international bandwidth) or utilizing open data (to save money on course
materials), governments and research institutions in Africa can meet and exceed
their educational and training goals without breaking the bank by adopting the
latest digital technologies.

In many ways, that was the point of Downes’s
first MOOC— with its emphasis on “open,” it was meant to democratize learning.
As organizations like Coursera and EdX havesought to monetize their offerings, some of
that ethos has been lost.

“In the rest of the world, the model is more
similar to the original connectivist MOOCs,” he says. “It’s not so much an
effort to replicate a traditional course, but to create a community that can
investigate for itself some discipline or area of study.”

Connectivism might sounds like a crunchy Silicon Valley buzzword but it actually describes a theory of education in which knowledge is distributed across human and nonhuman nodes in a network. As a Slate article put it, success in a connectivist mode of education means the ability to “navigate this network, link disparate fields, and contribute to the understanding of other people.”

“It’s a lot more learner-focused and a lot
less formal, and that’s the model we’re seeing globally,” Downes says.

It’s also a way to think about the future of
online education, which is in constant need of infusion of new technologies to
stay fresh and interesting. MOOC practitioners can make their courses ever more
relevant by linking disparate technologies to their courses of study.

“The benefit here is in savings and, of
course, employability, creativity, entrepreneurship, the list goes on. Just
look at how India developed its own technology industry by giving many people
access to open learning resources in this very informal, loose way.”

Downes is excited to share these case studies
with a new crowd in Africa, although he’s careful to note that he’s sharing,
not prescribing, what different communities should do—that would be something
he says he “isn’t qualified” to do. Most of all, coming to eLearning Africa, he
says, will give him a chance to hear voices that “aren’t represented in Europe
or North America.”

“All the infrastructure we take for granted here in Canada can be a challenge when you’re working in Africa — everything from power to internet access to physical and cyber security, The last thing I’m doing is going in there say you should do it this way; that’s not my purpose. I’m just there to say, ‘Here is some new and exciting stuff that’s happening around the world, and here’s how it could impact the future of education.’”

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